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Did he, as he claims, help create 100,000 jobs and thereby prove he knows how to do what the country needs most? Or were he and his fellow Harvard MBAs just “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company,” as Newt Gingrich claimed last week, or “vultures,” as Rick Perry claimed this week?

So far, the definitive and comprehensive answers to these questions have proven elusive to even the country’s best journalists because of the very private nature of private equity. The greatest privacy-destroying force known to man — an American presidential campaign — is going head-to-head with one of the most secretive redoubts of the American economy and for now, the door of Bain’s vault is holding.

“Bain, even for a private equity firm, is particularly private,” said Josh Kosman, author of “The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy.” “Most private equity firms are because once you look behind the numbers, there is much they don’t want you to see.”

But this week the undefined — and unexplained — nature of Romney’s Bain experience suddenly exploded as an issue. Gingrich and Perry doubled down on using Bain to paint Romney as a kind of Gordon Gekko figure — launching the kind of populist attacks that the Romney campaign had long expected from Democrats, who could not conceal their delight, but was a surprise coming from conservative Republicans.

During his victory speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Romney batted away these attacks as the “bitter politics of envy,” but Romney aides worry that the narrative that is beginning to develop — especially in South Carolina, where a pro-Gingrich super PAC plans to blanket the airwaves with snippets of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” a documentary about those laid off by companies Bain invested in — could have a disastrous effect in the general election.

But long before this message war heated up, reporters have been struggling to get to the bottom of Romney’s time at Bain.

In November, Josh Hicks, writing “The Fact Checker” column in The Washington Post, tried to verify a common Romney claim: “In those hundreds of businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs net-net were created,” but had to leave its report with “verdict pending.”

“Neither Bain nor the Romney campaign gave us the information when we asked for it,” Hicks wrote. “Bain also declined to answer with a yes or no whether its companies created more jobs than it eliminated during Romney’s tenure.”

As the Iowa ad wars heated up in December, Factcheck.org asked the pro-Romney super PAC Restore our Future to back up the claim in the ad it was running in Iowa that Romney created “thousands of jobs” at Bain. A spokeswoman replied, “We aren’t supplying that information.”

At the start of January, Romney got more specific in his claims, telling “Fox and Friends” that “we helped created over 100,000 new jobs” while at Bain. This time, when queried by the Post’s Glenn Kessler, the Romney campaign backed up the figure by saying it represented the current employment of three companies that Bain had either started or helped grow — Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino’s.

Even if you believe Romney's "job creation" claims, which I don't, how exactly do we replicate the Bain "corporate raider" strategy on a national level? Are we going to buy another small country, run up it's debt, sell of their assets, plunder its citizens savings accounts, pay ourselves a nice fee and then abandon it? That's the Bain preferred approach.

If we were to do for that small country what Bain claims to have done for Staples, we might even be able to create some jobs there. Of course we'd lose jobs here at home, just like all of those mon-and-pop office supply stores that Staples put out of business.

Look, if Mitt Romney is a vulture capitalist that loves to fire people he is just the guy we need to straighten out the bloated, overpaid government we have in place today.

Go Mitt, GO!! Fire them all. Get rid of the Education Department, They have failed miserably. Defund the 25% extra Obama gave to the EPA to fund cutting off our energy. Cut the 25% extra that Obama gave to NASA to bribe the enviro-whackos like James Hansen. Fire the entire money given to the IRS to hire new IRS employees to collect fines for Obamacare. Fire the Department of Agriculture that has more bureaucrats than there are farmers in this country.

1. Survey the people who were CFOs and CEOs of the companies that Bain invested in. Ask whether Bain raided them or helped them grow and create jobs. 2. Look at the balance sheets of companies that Bain took public as of the days that those companies went public. Were they loaded with debt compared with their industry peers? Hint: HCA, a Bain investment, has a lot of debt as it always has had because it has a very dependable cash flow from the government and private insurers. 3. Talk to the hospitals, colleges, pension funds and families that invested in Bain's funds. How many hospitals, college buildings and other things have been bought with profits made on investments in those Bain funds? How many kids are getting better health care and educations because of those investments? How many retirees are benefitting from this investments? 4. Learn the difference between raiders, venture capitalists and private enterprise investors. Distinguish between the raiders who put companies deeply in debt and in bankruptcy courts and those that invested in companies and tried to grow them until they succeeded because they were in the right businesses or failed because they were in bad businesses. 5.Review the bankruptcy filings of companies that Bain owned to find out how they got in trouble. It probably wasn't because Bain invested in them and tried to make them profitable. 6. Look at the careers of people who lost jobs while Bain's investments were being restructured. Have they been big successes since, or are they flipping burgers? 7. Look at the fact that Bain has made only 250 investments since its founding in 1984. That's less than 10 a year. That's not the record of a corporate raider or flipper.

1. Survey the people who were CFOs and CEOs of the companies that Bain invested in. Ask whether Bain raided them or helped them grow and create jobs. 2. Look at the balance sheets of companies that Bain took public as of the days that those companies went public. Were they loaded with debt compared with their industry peers? Hint: HCA, a Bain investment, has a lot of debt as it always has had because it has a very dependable cash flow from the government and private insurers. 3. Talk to the hospitals, colleges, pension funds and families that invested in Bain's funds. How many hospitals, college buildings and other things have been bought with profits made on investments in those Bain funds? How many kids are getting better health care and educations because of those investments? How many retirees are benefitting from this investments? 4. Learn the difference between raiders, venture capitalists and private enterprise investors. Distinguish between the raiders who put companies deeply in debt and in bankruptcy courts and those that invested in companies and tried to grow them until they succeeded because they were in the right businesses or failed because they were in bad businesses. 5.Review the bankruptcy filings of companies that Bain owned to find out how they got in trouble. It probably wasn't because Bain invested in them and tried to make them profitable. 6. Look at the careers of people who lost jobs while Bain's investments were being restructured. Have they been big successes since, or are they flipping burgers? 7. Look at the fact that Bain has made only 250 investments since its founding in 1984. That's less than 10 a year. That's not the record of a corporate raider or flipper.

Dade Behring even as it headed for layoffs and bankruptcy, or Reuters’s tale of a how Bain managed to make money from its purchase of a Kansas steel mill that ultimately had to have its pension fund bailed out by the government.

Is it capitalism to raid a pension fund, divide it among investers, and then let the American Taxpayer bail out the fund?

Let the games begin!! I have my white cheddar popcorn ready. Now start the name calling, hyperbole laden insults showing that your side knows best! As always, don't forget the hate, conspiracy theories and ignorance that makes this all worth reading!

The secrecy of private equity firms is a great part to this story --- for Ron Paul. The secrecy of the Federal Reserve is similar. Remember Chairman Bernanke telling Congress he could not disclose information to Congress? You remember: the Fed's strategy for recovery was: sell more derivatives! Keep the Bubble going...

While what Mitt did at Bain was legal I don't think it was ethical or moral. That tells me of the man's character. He will use legal means as in invading Iran if elected but that does not mean it is ethical or moral. America can ill afford to expand the of government, our debt, and shed the blood of more of our children for legal but un-ethical and un-moral wars for nothing more than economic gain for private corporations.